United States

With just two days left in 2015, the main driver of overnight global stocks and US equity futures remains the most familiar one of all of 2015 - crude oil, which, after its latest torrid bounce yesterday has resumed the familiar "yoyo" mode, and again stumbled dropping below $37 on yesterday's surprising API 2.9 million crude inventory build, as well several more long-term "forecasts" by OPEC members, with Kuwait now budgeting for $30 oil, while Venezuela's Maduro said the oil price fell to $28/bbl and is "headed downward."

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 gave birth to a dangerous American ideology called neoconservativism. The Soviet Union had served as a constraint on US unilateral action. With the removal of this constraint on Washington, neoconservatives declared their agenda of US world hegemony. America was now the “sole superpower,” the “unipower,” that could act without restraint anywhere in the world.

The Washington Post neoconservative journalist Charles Krauthammer summed up the “new reality” as follows:

The U.S. dollar is currently accepted as the world’s reserve currency, but it hasn't always been this way. Reserve currencies change depending on macroeconomic trends: typically, the reserve currency belongs to the world’s most stable and influential economy. 

As HowMuch.net notes, the U.S. dollar has been the official reserve currency since the end of World War II, when the world’s powers agreed to implement the Bretton Woods System, officially setting the U.S. dollar as the anchor currency that could be exchanged at a fixed rate for gold.

As we recently reported, the US aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman had made its way through The Mediterranean Sea, launchiung airstrikes on Syria and Iraq on its way. While the proximity of so many vessels, fighter jets, coasts, friends, enemies, and frenemies was always precarious, NBC News reports that the carrier came within 1500 yards of an Iranian rocket fired in a live-fire exercise in the Straits of Hormuz last week. US officials said this was "unnecessarily provocative and unsafe" from Obama's nuclear-deal partners.

An Iraqi commander claims that the U.S. secretly evacuated top ISIS commanders from Ramadi, Iraq:

The Express Tribune - associated with the International New York Times - reported in January: